Chapter 2: Getting With The Program

After I successfully sued the garbage collection company for unfair dismissal and gender discrimination, setting a powerful precedent along the way, I found myself in a peculiar position. I was suddenly in possession of more money than I ever had or would ever need, with no immediate plans, or form of employment (not that I needed any, but I was getting bored). It had been a number of years, and I had gotten used to this drastic change pretty much the same way I had trained myself to get used to other changes in my life.

Now, while it might sound crazy, an unexpected sex change is not so difficult to deal with when you compare it with other experiences you may have encountered, or are soon to encounter. Of course, the latter may take a little longer to present itself for comparison, and the former may be a distant memory, but there are other things to keep yourself occupied with while you wait, or while you figure out a way to jog your memory. A Nintendo Wii, for example.

Anyway, my method of dealing with this drastic change, which enabled me to just get on with my life (and my law suit) was to draw up a list of all the shocking things that I’d experienced up to that point in my life and how I dealt with them.

Like the first time I got my heart broken, and the questions that flooded my mind when she told me it was over. At what point did she start feeling that way? How was it possible for her to do a 180 on me overnight, especially since she came three times the night before? Did she come three times the night before?

Questions questions questions. And there were never any answers. Indeed there were no answers anyone could have given me that would have made me feel any better. Or take my girl and I back to where we used to be. Back to the giggly beginnings, and experimental sexual manoeuvres, and back to spending twenty minutes at 7-Eleven standing in front of the slurpee machine, deciding which flavour to get her.

In the end, I learnt that it didn’t matter how many times I revisited the beautiful things that happened in the past and compared them to the massive shipwreck that I was going through. There were simply no answers to some questions, and I just had to get on with it.

Like the time I got abducted by aliens.

I was in the middle of winning a game of tennis when they came and took me. I blame television for giving us the wrong impression of alien abduction. Contrary to Spielberg, they do not come hovering above us in spaceships equipped with high-powered lighting equipment which work to identify the person they want to abduct and then transport said person onto the mother/fathership (it’s important to be PC these days if you don’t want to look ignorant) — aliens drive, just like everybody else.

So, I blame television. If television had not been responsible for repeated gross misrepresentations of alien abductions, I’d have immediately recognised that Sony air conditioning repair van and the two skinny guys running out of it towards me.

But then again, maybe it was also partially my fault for not being as alert as I should have been, as Sony do not make air conditioners, and air con repairmen are never in a hurry to do anything.

But that was a lesson learnt, and also turned out quite well because as soon as they realised I was not Mahathir, they chucked me out of the van, right outside my house, so I ended up saving the bus fare as well.

There was nothing I could have done about that disrupted game of tennis, it wasn’t my fault (the aliens eventually wrote me a letter explaining that it was a clerical error on their part, and assured me that they would be more careful when conducting future abductions), there was certainly nothing I could do about it now that it had happened, so I just had to get on with it.

And that was how I dealt with the sex change.

Copyright 2011 June Low All Rights Reserved

June is currently on holiday in the Tobago Cays. It’s absolutely stunning but there are lots of sting rays and cowfish hanging about, looking dangerous.